The worst thing about anti-Blackness is that, like misogyny, it can be internalized, and once someone convinces you to hate yourself, they control you.
After a TikToker posted that she did not like ghetto/hood, Black people, many suburban Black girls agreed, and as someone who probably thought that way, here’s why it’s stupid.
@thekeptwifelife__ We’re traumatized hopefully someone can change my mind one day🤷🏽♀️ #fyp #fypシ #hood #blacktiktok ♬ Monkeys Spinning Monkeys – Kevin MacLeod & Kevin The Monkey
I grew up in two very different worlds. I was born on the south side of Chicago, in the South Loop. The Loop is a coveted place to live, and the South Loop, at the time, was where poverty and the palatial came head-to-head. The projects were half a mile west, and the brand-new luxury townhomes (worth over $1 million today) were just a mile north. We were somewhere trapped in between, metaphorically and financially, and this difference is something that I noticed very early on. Even as children, some of us who lived in my apartment building would make distinctions between us and the “project kids.” When it came time for me to go to school, I entered a brand-new building with controversy already staining its walls. Those townhomes were purchased by parents who wanted their children to go to a nice beautiful school, however the children in my apartment building, and the Hilliard Homes projects were bused miles away.
The meetings were contentious, ending in the compromise that the children from my apartment building were allowed access, but the kids who lived in the projects went to the branch school located in…the projects. Once the branch school became overcrowded, it was repurposed for kindergarten and first graders. The owners of those townhomes, all white, were not about to send their children to a school located at the bottom of society, especially not five and six-year-olds. Thus, over time, the white enrollment became less and less at both the branch and the main campus.
“You are not afraid of Black people from the hood. What you are afraid of is being treated and thought about the way you treat and think about Black people from the hood.” – @Ryan_Ken_Acts pic.twitter.com/O93yOzv3qy
— CiCi Adams🌸 (@CiCiAdams_) March 12, 2024
Children who lived in the projects, sitting next to children who lived in luxury townhomes, could be the scapegoat for the decline in white enrollment, but really, it would not have mattered. We were just a little less water than them in an already broken levy.
I stayed at that school halfway through fourth grade until my mother and I moved to Florida. The rest of my childhood, other than the summers, was spent in a bedroom community located in a county right outside of Orlando. The area is known for its calm suburban life, with wildlife in the backyard. It is a haven for Target’s target demographic and black bears. Most residents there don’t see racism because they are too busy not seeing race. For context, I grew up 15 miles away from where Trayvon Martin was murdered. From fourth grade to graduation, I was approximately 1 of 2.5 Black kids in my classes. My courses of mostly honors, foreign language and A.P., kept me even more isolated from the small Black population in school. The Black girls did not like me, and I can honestly say that without provocation. There were multiple instances of me feeling targeted by them, which left me feeling distant and even better than them.
Don’t hate Black people from the hood but I do hate that the government created poverty, trapped us into urban and suburban ghettos, which forced many of us to develop or adopt antiblack attitudes about our own that can look like but not limited to fetishization and demonization
— Charles Preston (@_CharlesPreston) March 13, 2024
It was easy for me to say that Black girls did not like me because, well, they didn’t, but the gag is, I was a Black girl, too.
I grew up with white people who could easily compartmentalize how they felt about Black people. They could have me as a friend, listen to rap music even, and not be fond of a certain type of Black people (even if they were making the music they loved), a sentiment that easily rubs off on someone who is socially isolated from their own people but is hard to scrub off. In their minds, those things kept them from being racist, not their ideologies, but their adjacency to Black things that they liked, without having to be around too much Blackness. It was not until my senior year that I realized that when I looked out into a crowd, everyone looked the same; when they looked out into a crowd, everyone looked the same, except me. In high school, I was in survival mode. I had so little contact with Black kids at my school, and so felt so little understanding from white kids.
My Blackness always came with othering attached to it. I was smart…. for a Black girl. I was pretty…for a Black girl. I was well-spoken…for a Black girl. I was all good things despite my Blackness because to them, Blackness was inherently bad, and whiteness was inherently good… to them, I was white….for a Black girl. All the things that made me great were always asterisked with being Black as if it were to symbolize a point deduction.
It was not until I got to college that I was able to look back on how horrible my suburban education was. Sure, I went to a top school but was constantly pushed to the bottom. There was no cultural nuance in my education. On standardized tests, I scored above the 90th percentile in everything except science. I was told by my fifth-grade teacher that I was not ready to be tested for gifted. Every Friday, she sent me and two other students to tutor white kindergarteners in reading because the three of us had the highest grades in English in our class. In sixth grade geography, we had enough time for Antarctica but not Africa. That same year, my four core teachers had a private conference with me during their planning period, just me. They sat there and berated me about my behavior and performance, which essentially was that I was too talkative and too inquisitive. My lowest grade was a B in math. They never called my mother to tell her they had issues with me. She found out when her ten-year-old came home in tears. Mrs. Dunlap was my 12th-grade English Honors teacher; by the time I was in her class, I had already taken Latin IV and finished French II and German III that same year with A’s. Though I was only one of two students who passed a grammar pop quiz (I got a 100), I was unable to make above a C on a paper.
This is also the same teacher who continued to admonish me for talking, even after a white male student admitted it was him and not me. I won’t even get into the harm my arts teachers caused, but as a full-time artist every time I pick up a paintbrush or a microphone, I hope a little more of it disappears. This is not to say that I did not have any pleasant experiences with my teachers, but I can count them on one hand. Many of my teachers did not like that their brightest student was also their darkest student.
As a suburban Black person, being in the hood has never made me feel as unsafe as being the only Black person in any room full of white ppl. Fearing your own people, esp the ones more disadvantaged than you, is internalized racism. You need to work that out in therapy not online. https://t.co/2GiGEbbQ3h
— Taylor Goethe | 🍉 (@InspectorNerd) March 10, 2024
While I did not always speak about my negative experiences, immediately after high school ended, Black girls not liking me was a story I probably would’ve told first, but other than some dirty looks from girls whose names I can’t recall and who probably did not even know mine, they were so small in the grand scheme of traumatic instances. I do remember the names of my white bullies, though, whom I never recounted as white bullies, just bullies; this includes my teachers. I know their names with bitterness still tattooed on my tongue, but I never vocally attached their whiteness to their meanness, even if my Blackness was the reason for it. They never got the indignation of me using a color as an adjective describing their behavior. My white teachers and white bullies were the ones who actually harmed me.
Their discrimination is the trauma that I still carry.
When Black Tiktokers mention the preference for the suburbs over the hood, they always forget these parts of the story. There is always an immediate need to juxtapose the perceived nicest of whiteness against the most egregious behaviors attributed to Black people. One user even compared a Whole Foods in Maine to a grocery store that is shot up multiple times a day. Well, who the hell wouldn’t? The logic is also extremely flawed. Comparing the perceived best parts of White habitations against the worst parts of Black habitations will never be a sound and fair argument. As someone who has been to Maine more than once, I much prefer the friendliness of a Bodega in Brooklyn, plus they have cats. They also do this really weird thing where they treat you like a person. Maybe a better comparison would be the place where Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee meet. Once, while driving through the area, I realized that I could not make it to my destination before my bladder gave out. I stopped at a gas station with a police car, not knowing if that would be a good thing or a bad thing. It’s a crazy feeling to be stared at and looked through at the same time. Bodega me, please.
That was not the first time I went to a place where I was the only Black person in a large group of White people and felt unsafe, nor was it the last, but White people, no matter how racist they are, still get to detach their bad actions from their whiteness. As a traveling artist, I’ve had the amazing opportunity to have visited 46 states, most at least three times; while some places are more racist than others—I’m looking at you, Boston—there is danger in all zip codes, and just because they aren’t “killing each other,” doesn’t mean they won’t kill me.
Peeling off your own anti-Blackness is hard because you must admit how you were not just wrong but wrong about yourself.
You have to realize that a lot of white people do compartmentalize Black people, but their reverence is often reserved for just the ones they know (or are attracted to). My closest biological family members lived a 6-hour drive away, but many of my Florida weekends were spent with my aunt and uncle and my play cousins whom I met doing sports. I would spend most of my summers in Chicago, mostly with my best friend, while my dad worked. They all lived in Black neighborhoods, the same type of neighborhoods that many Black suburbanites would have looked down upon, and what’s crazy is never once did I not feel at home or change in level of safety, even in my own personal social awkwardness. Never did I not feel embraced. When visiting my father’s family in the countriest parts of Arkansas, never did I not know love. Black people who played loud music, had gold teeth and wore attire that would be deemed questionable by “decent” society were people that my suburban upbringing told me to separate myself from because they were the ones who received the most disdain from whites. These people were my aunties, my uncles, my first, second and third cousins. They were the ones who wiped away my tears and healed my wounds, but here I was, thinking it was better to be embraced by someone who had already cut me.
One of the women who was the most vocal about the hood/ghetto conversation had the honor of having her mugshot posted, who knows maybe in jail she was reminded too hard that she was Black, maybe in jail, her classism was null and void, and it went into overdrive when she got out. Black people from the hood/ghetto get the worst treatment from white society, but that does not mean that Black people who follow the rules of respectability politics to a tee are not subject to the cruelty and indignation of racism. Attempting to separate ourselves from people who receive the worst treatment is not a formula for us to receive the best.
I love how we all get on here and lie cause it sounds good 😭😭 I’m choosing a Whole Foods in Maine than a corner where people get shot multiple times any day https://t.co/rlyOYlqS0n
— Kara (@mylifeiskara) March 13, 2024
Racism does not care how non-violent or well-dressed you are, because…MLK. Black people have to prove they are good people. White people have to prove that they are not. Black people who are “ghetto,” are victims of redlining, food deserts, lack of funding for public infrastructure and education, and many of us suburban Blacks are simply the ones whose parents slipped through a hole in the gates when no one was looking.
I know because my mother was once a “project kid,” too.
